About this site

This site is powered by Joomla, that in the last 3 years has become one of the more popular CMS on the net. I started with Joomla when I got in charge of a site of one Astronomical Society of Guadalajara ( activity I left in the beginning of 2011 ).

I was thinking to use WordPress, another platform that I used in my last company where I worked in Mexico, but I decided to choose Joomla due to all flexibility for customize the different parts of a website and a great variety of plug-ins that exist already. WordPress is great but is very straight and, from my point of view, is good when you want to do one simplest things.

I needed to have content in three different languages, so the feature that takes me to choose Joomla over WordPress was the release of multilingual feature site.

The way Joomla manages different content language is like you have one different site per idiom in the same site, and you can have configure it differently for each language. That's mean that you are not forced to translate every aspect of the site from the main language to the others. The down side is you have to duplicate every module or article you make if you want have one-to-one correspondence to the others languages you manage.

For this site, I made myself the adaptation of HTML design to a Joomla template ( who was indeed a WordPress template ). I adapted it to work with the components and plugins of Joomla. There are many pre-build ready to use Joomla templates, but one my objectives was to learn how to apply more advanced features of Joomla templates like components HTML overrides, language overrides, css, etc and choose a design I really like.

Also, when I cannot find some plug-in for some functionality I need, Joomla offers a way that let me do the plugin very easily.

Joomla is a good CMS, with good support and a great community, and each time is getting more powerful due the features have been added, like indexed search. Is one of my favorites Open Source projects.
Only one thing I consider they're missing is a well structured, consistent and complete documentation. Most of it is not well documented, they lack of detail an examples, you can find many documentation mixed in the same place. I must search often in the code source to figure out how a component or method or class works. ( I would like that the documentation was as good as the JQuery project )